Monday, 11 December 2017

On Saturday, Labour’s Deputy Leader during the terrible 1980s, published a pieceentitled “Labour’s greatest crisis. Time to fight back”. It is not a bad summary of Labour’s current troubles.

The trigger for the article was the Militant-style takeover of the Haringey party this week, providing uncomfortable echoes for those of a certain age of what happened in Liverpool and many London boroughs in the 1980s.

It is fair to judge that Hattersley, like his old colleague Kinnock – although, as he writes in his autobiography, “we were never soul-mates”, one traditional right, one soft-left – might have erred a little in their eagerness to embrace the Miliband years. Perhaps because both of them instinctively reacted against the New Labour years as evidence that the pendulum of Labour policy had swung too far towards the Tories for either to bear, they did not seem to see the creeping rise of the far left he facilitated as a real threat, more as a natural correction back to a world they understood.

They surely do now. And, as someone at the top table during the rise of Militant, it is instructive to read the former Deputy Leader’s practical comparisons of Militant and Momentum. That is, Hattersley – and no Blairite he – should surely know.In the 1980s, moderate MPs fought back. The central pillar of Hattersley’s argument is that, during those years, there was an organised resistance to Militant among the PLP. It was there on Corbyn’s election, but seems to have all but evaporated two years later.Militant “commanded less support and was active in fewer constituencies”.

Wednesday, 6 December 2017

It is surely worth commenting on today's Brexit select committee, where the world discovered that *drum roll* the impact analyses which were demanded by Parliament were not so much drafted at short notice, but did not actually exist at the time when the request was made and still do not exist. Such government incompetence in surely the UK's most far-reaching policy decision of the postwar period simply beggars belief.

In short:

If you are managing a modest-sized IT project, you do an impact assessment for any significant change in its terms. They failed to this for a COUNTRY. Unbelievable. https://t.co/J2j4MX0mj1

Even as a card-carrying Leaver, you must surely worry at the failure to reach even this most basic level of preparation for this monumental change.As someone pointed out today, the Irish government carried out an extensive investigation even before the Brexit vote happened. A country with only secondary impacts from Brexit. For the one actually implementing Brexit, it seems, it was all too much trouble.

Thursday, 23 November 2017

The election of Richard Leonard has, inevitably, provoked jubilation on the Party’s left and despair in the rest of the party. While despair is certainly the more appropriate reaction, there has been some misreading on both sides.

First, let’s deal with the left. Yes, Scottish Labour really needed to reinvent itself, faced with a hegemonic SNP and falling into third place – yes, third, in a country which had previously been solidly Labour as long as anyone could remember – in the 2016 and 2017 elections. But not like this.

Jim Murphy and, later, Kezia Dugdale tried and failed to carry out that reinvention. But the truth is that they were both up against an atrophied Scottish party, made soft and flabby by years of Brown-era coddling.

Friday, 3 November 2017

Perhaps, just perhaps, historians might look back at this week and say, that is the week that the tide started to turn against populist politics and at least some parts of the world managed to save themselves from it.

Probably for some states, Turkey, Hungary, Russia and perhaps Poland, from where I write, it is too late. But some with longer-established democratic traditions still may have the will and the mechanisms to turn it around, in time to prevent lasting damage.

It has been the week of two signal events: the first indictments in Trump/Russia, which may yet lead to the early collapse of an ignominious presidency; and a poll showing that public opinion may finally have twigged that Brexit negotiations are headed down a blind alley with no good result for Britain.

Thursday, 5 October 2017

In between the petty spats of the Tory conference this week or the surreal cult of Labour’s gathering last week, there was a potentially seismic political event for Europe (and Britain) a thousand miles away: Sunday’s referendum for Catalan independence. It is big news: while a major general election campaign was happening in the EU’s most populous country, this little region’s impending vote was stealing the headlines for much of it.

It seems suddenly shocking but, for those of us familiar with Spanish and Catalan politics, it is essentially an event that has been at least a decade in the making, but which has approached Spain’s now largely stable democracy like a relentless iceberg, and which the national government’s general cack-handedness has made it seemingly powerless to stop.

This time, around 90% of the votes have been cast for “Sí”, although the vote is technically illegal and many anti-independence voters have naturally boycotted it. Reasons are many: there is first raw, emotional nationalism; then more rational, economic unfairness (Catalonia is a net contributor to taxes and “subsidises” poorer regions; some may even have voted yes in the (mistaken) belief that Spain’s foreign policy had somehow helped precipitate recent ISIS attacks in Barcelona and an independent Catalonia would instead be safe.

Saturday, 23 September 2017

“Dennis Skinner…votes with Tories” ran the headline. But the truth is that Dennis Skinner actually voted for what he believes in: that Britain is better-off outside the EU. He only did what Jeremy Corbyn had already done hundreds of times (about five hundred, reportedly): vote with the Tories against his own party. As did six of his backbench colleagues (interestingly, Caroline Flint MP, who abstained, seemed to get more grief on social media than Skinner, who voted for the motion. We leave readers to draw their own conclusions as to why that might be).

Corbyn’s calculation, in contrast, was based on what it usually is: what he could get away with. Does anyone seriously believe that he has changed his opinion on the EU after over three decades opposing it as an MP?

Friday, 25 August 2017

It does not take a Nostradamus to predict that this year’s will have to be the craziest Labour conference since 1985 or, quite possibly, ever.

On the one hand you will have hubris: bright-eyed young Corbynite new recruits, feeling buoyed and excited by the party’s “success” in the general election (i.e. we did not lose too badly). The old-fashioned Trots, to their surprise finding themselves back in the party and with their day in the sun. And some of the long-time, idealistic soft left, not yet jaded by the disingenuousness of their leader’s position on Europe.

On the other you will have something approaching despair: the party’s centrists, Blairites, Brownites (as if those labels mean anything any more) and perhaps some old-time trade unionists and working-class members, seeking out each others’ company for warmth, in the party’s long, cold, dark night of the soul.

Sunday, 13 August 2017

It is not for months but, in fact, years that some of us have tried to draw attention to the pathological infatuation of Labour’s hard left (and even some of the soft left) to the Venezuelan regime of Hugo Chávez.

The attraction was straightforward: a kind of “Cuba-lite”, where in contrast defenders could always point to at least some kind of democracy, slanted towards the ruling party with various “cheats” though it was (such as the inequitable use of state television for propaganda). Not to mention, of course, a dazzling oil wealth which could comfortably mask the self-enriching activities of the ruling kleptocracy and still leave a bit of largesse to spread among its voters around election time, in the name of “true socialism”.

Indeed, so attractive was it that some of our current crop of hard-left doyennes, in perhaps less elevated times than they now sit, headed out for the Caribbean in 2012, the October of Chávez’s last election before his death.

Step forward, Diane Abbott and sidekick Owen Jones, “impartial observers” of the election. Except that they weren’t, of course, they were friends of one side only, as I helpfully pointed out to them while they were in Caracas as the guests of the Venezuelan National Electoral Council (run by a Chávez crony, incidentally).

Even so, Labour aimed to outdo them in the madness stakes. The man who was, in theory, the most senior opposition politician campaigning against Brexit, finally admitted that he was not, if he ever had been, anti-Brexit at all. In fact, the Labour leader was now in favour of the hardest of Brexits. Britain would unequivocally leave the Single Market.

Furthermore, it seems that Corbyn does not actually understand the phenomenon of the European Economic Area; he believes that you have to be in the EU to be part of the Single Market (you don’t, as Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland will attest).

Shortly afterwards, one of said members, Roy Bentham, demanded a pledge of allegiance to the leadership from her, the implication being that, if she did not start to be behave herself as a good Corbynite, she would soon face deselection: “Luciana needs to get on board quite quickly now…she will have to be answerable to us. We would like her to come out publicly like other MPs have done and apologise for not supporting him in the past.”

We could look at this story in two ways. First, the way that the local party and, ultimately, Berger herself have spun it: that it was an exaggerated story from the Liverpool local press, stirring up trouble. There was a tweet to that effect from Berger, disassociating herself from the Sunday Times tweet on the story, and a statement that the party was doing well under Corbyn. The local CLP also distanced itself from the remarks made by Bentham.

The second way is this: exactly what the Times said in its leader (£). In short, whatever the local party or MP might claim, there will definitely be a move to oust Berger, at least unless she toes the Corbynite line from now on. It is not hard to see that this is the right interpretation, whether Berger wants to accept it or not. One has to ask why Momentum would bother to take control a local party and then leave in place an MP who has views diametrically opposed to the Momentumites.

Wednesday, 5 July 2017

Two weeks ago it was announced that Progress, the centre-left pressure group within the Labour party, would cease to be funded by its patron for over a decade, Lord Sainsbury.

Progress has always been the part of the party most in tune with the British public, rather than Labour members or supporters, and has been unafraid to challenge Labour to engage with new voters, rather than preach to the converted.

It has therefore, as one might imagine, had a somewhat tough time since the party’s return to opposition and its gradual move to the left since that point. During the Miliband era, it continued to push quietly but firmly towards the centre, providing a useful ballast to the creeping “hullo clouds, hullo sky” impossiblism of the party’s then leadership.

However, even during that era, it was under attack: Miliband’s appeasement of the increasingly militant Unite union required the organisation in 2012 to take measures to defend itself against those, like Unite’s leader Len McCluskey, who accused it of “manipulations” and who would happily see it severed from the party body politic.

Friday, 16 June 2017

For some MPs and commentators, suddenly everything has changed about Labour’s situation. But what, exactly? Did we win, as Emily Thornberry thought we did? Has Jeremy Corbyn now become the nation’s best choice for prime minister? Is it just “one more heave”?

Hmm. Not really. In fact, dig a bit deeper and we might observe the opposite: that in fact, very little has changed at all.

Yes, Corbyn confounded expectations of the votes he could poll nationally. As did Theresa May. However, the mere fact that his impressive upswing in vote-share did not actually win him the election should give us pause, for three reasons.

Friday, 9 June 2017

Yes, yes, I know I was predicting that Labour would do much worse than they actually did. And it seems Corbyn did enthuse the young and get them to the polling station. But it's not so simple as that. And since they are not forming a government, any sense of achievement is relative; relative to the terrible expectations most people - including myself - had.Thing is this: they still lost, despite having the biggest upswing in voteshare since Clem Attlee in 1945. How?Simple. They didn't target seats where they needed to convert Tory voters. They got people (such as young people) to vote who normally stayed at home, but in areas which were mostly already Labour. Pointless.I am sure that if we graphed changes in no. of seats to changes in voteshare for the last n elections, this would be an outlier. It's really hard to have such a poor campaign strategy that you end up pissing away a massive increase in votes, one that could have put you in power.UPDATE 13JUN: Tomorrow I will post that graph at Labour Uncut. It is an outlier, the biggest of the post-war period.

Thursday, 8 June 2017

I have voted Labour (actually about 10 days ago, by post) and, for the first time in my life, with no enthusiasm whatsoever. I voted for the party under Ed Miliband, knowing he was unlikely to win but at least thinking he was a vaguely decent human being, who might just be able to learn on the job and deliver something for Britain if elected.

I am afraid I cannot do so with Jeremy Corbyn. I have been in this party too long to leave it, clinically, to the dogs and believe it is not dead yet. But it is clearly drinking in the last chance saloon.

What led us here? Two different cases of self-indulgence, of making a poor decision on a whim. People being bored and longing for “inspiration”, “excitement” about politics. Well, look back on your handiwork now and glow with pride.

Exhibit A: the self-indulgence of 52% the electorate – because it ought to be called out as that – in falling for the snake-oil salesmen who sold them Brexit and then ran away. Who genuinely believed they would “take back control”. Instead they have pointlessly given a seismic shock to economic confidence from which it will surely take years to recover.

Nationalism is invariably about emotion, not logic. Ask non-nationalist Scots, or Catalans. It has no “reason”. It just is. But like religion, or any other political ideology, it can be powerful.

Britain has had such a disastrously weak opposition since September 2015, that it not only failed dismally to argue the case for Remain but has been unable to provide a pro-European opposition in this general election, which has by default confirmed Theresa May’s mandate to implement a Brexit as hard as she likes.

Exhibit B: the self-indulgence of many of the Labour Party’s activists and supporters (although there are also many honourable exceptions) in thinking it can defy political gravity and get elected the only truly far-left leader in the party’s century-long history.

And if you genuinely think that Jeremy Corbyn does not qualify as “far left”, it’s because you haven’t been listening for about the last forty years. In fact, he is one of only a handful of British politicans not to change their views over that time (most of the rest are his Shadow Cabinet allies).

And of course a special prize for self-indulgence goes to the 35 idiot MPs (there is no other word for them) who decided they would break with the common sense rules of the PLP deciding the leadership shortlist, in favour nominating of someone who they actually didn’t even vote for “so all sides of the party were represented”. As a result, an unexpected win for Corbyn has coming close to actually choking the life out of their beloved party.

No, it is self-indulgence which has led us here. We chide the Americans over Trump, but we are exactly the same. We have indulged our fantasies over the serious business of who runs the country and are now paying the price via the awful, lose-lose choice we are faced with today.

And if you want to know what happens to countries which don’t take seriously the business of who runs the country, you need only look as far as recent events in Turkey. Or Russia. Or even little Hungary, vying within the EU for the dubious distinction of being its first dictatorship. We Europeans sure have short memories of the history of our continent, to have got so frivolous, so quickly, about who governs us.

“Eternal vigilance”, Aldous Huxley wrote in a variation on the old saw, “is not only the price of liberty; eternal vigilance is the price of human decency.”

We might reflect on that, as our party lies in pieces. We not only failed to be vigilant, we self-indulgently, complacently let them in. We invited them in.

Friday, 2 June 2017

A week left of campaigning, and Britain’s political race to the bottom is in full flight. Polls all over the shop; but narrowing at the end, as they invariably do.

In different ways, the Tory and Labour campaigns are spectacularly failing to enthuse the electorate.

The Tories, for whom the election has always been theirs to lose, seem intent on torpedoing their own campaign. Uncosted pledges – almost unheard of for usually-meticulous Tories – and their fiasco on the “dementia tax”, resulting in a mid-campaign U-turn by May.

Then there is the air campaign. First she is front and centre: then the party panics and sees her wooden, unengaging and largely absent. John Prescott reports a senior Tory viewing the campaign as “a disaster”, and that opinion is surely not a one-off among the grandees, let alone the commentariat.

Saturday, 20 May 2017

Even for these unusual times, we might note that this is a highly unusual election.

First, it is a snap election, the first in over four decades. Labour is even more woefully unprepared than it would have been in 2020.

Second, it has local elections in the middle of the short campaign, for which there is no recent precedent (in 2001, when the general election was in June, the locals were too). It gives a highly unusual pre-poll to the general election.

Third, it has had the critical-for-Europe-and-the-world, French election in the middle of the short campaign as well. We’ll come on to that.

A recap of the glaringly obvious: It is difficult to see those local election results as anything but disastrous. Vote-share down to an appalling 27%. Governing party up rather than down in mid-term. In Scotland, SNP seats swinging away from them going to the Tories, not Labour.

The general election prognosis, then: the Tory lead likely to be between 12% and whatever that lead is currently polling (currently around 18%), as I have argued here. Around 16% gap would be a conservative estimate, which would give a Tory majority of 100. But taking YouGov’s regional polls – which one would expect to be more accurate – and extrapolating using the Electoral Calculus predictor, you can see the possibility of it being well over 200 seats.

If all this were not enough, Corbyn this week selected Stalin apologist, Andrew Murray, from the Stop the War Coalition, to lead Labour’s campaign. Imagine the reaction if the Tories appointed joined up a Nazi apologist from the BNP and then appointed them campaign chief. As one Labour insider commented to HuffPo’s Paul Waugh, Murray is to Corbyn as Steve Bannon is to Trump. An unapologetic extremist.

It is clear, then, that all eyes are on the election after the election. The Labour leadership. It is notable that some of Labour’s few recent success stories – Burnham in Manchester, Khan in London – are visibly distancing themselves from Corbyn, as they foresee that any connection to him is tomorrow’s political poison.

Is it bad form to be discussing the aftermath of the party’s inevitable defeat in the middle of the short campaign? Probably. But these are not normal times: no MP, apart from perhaps one or two inside Corbyn’s Kool-Aid-drinking inner circle, seriously believes that Labour can win. They are going through the motions, as is their duty.

But there are two small glints of silver in the cloud currently covering the party.

The first is that it is clear that days of the hard left’s tenure at the highest echelons of the Labour Party are numbered. The question is how long it takes to dislodge them (and the dislodging of their acolytes further down the tree is likely to take a much longer time, if the party’s experience with Militant is anything to go by). Critically, whether they hang on long enough to deal the party a mortal blow in the meantime, meaning that the only way forward is through some new political grouping.

The possibilities are as follows.One: Corbyn bows out. He takes it on the chin, accepts responsibility for the defeat and acquiesces. This, while under normal political conditions being the most likely option for a leader, seems the least likely. And it is because of the parliamentary arithmetic. As the good John Rentoul points out, it would be almost impossible for a hard-left successor to garner the nominations necessary to qualify. Result: win for common sense, unless of course the party is reduced to so few MPs that the proportion of Corbynites is high enough to nominate after all. In which case the party is toast.

Sadly, the fact that it would likely spell conclusive defeat for the hard left makes it the least likely. It seems unlikely that, no matter how tired the man himself might be, the group around him would accept their immolation as a political force and could therefore press him to stay in one way or another. In short, he is the only one who can get them onto a leadership shortlist.

Two: Corbyn stands and loses. And we end up back at point one, albeit with a more conclusive defeat for the hard left, because it is seen to be defeated in a democratic vote.

Three: Corbyn clings on without a vote. Theoretically possible but it would make Labour utterly dysfunctional, with the remaining PLP in open revolt. There would undoubtedly be a challenger at some point, if only to get an attack in before the McDonnell amendment changed the leadership election rules and locked the hard left into the mainstream. Not sustainable, although more damaging to the party with each month that passed.

Four: Corbyn stands and wins. This is certainly possible. It has been established that as leader he can stand in a leadership battle, whatever. And he still has a significant following among members, many of whom seem oblivious to Labour’s existential crisis. But this option is disastrous for Labour. The public would not forgive us a renewed Corbyn mandate. And even many of his fans would find it difficult to justify continued support after an electoral meltdown.

All in all, it looks highly likely that Corbyn will either jump or be pushed, and that someone relatively sensible will be able to take over. Good.

And now the second ray of hope. Emmanuel Macron, in the middle of the campaign, has become French president from nowhere. It seems that, contrary to current received wisdom, Europeans have not turned against centrist pro-Europeans at all; rather, they have turned against traditional parties.

This is good news in itself for the Labour succession: a sensible centrist could potentially recover electorally relatively quickly, provided he or she were ruthless enough to clean up the party firmly and rapidly. But furthermore, in the unhappy event that the party turned out to have been fatally damaged by the Corbynite incursion – which is certainly not impossible – it shows that the founding of a new, centre-left party could have traction in these turbulent times.

In the event that it came to that, all of us would have to examine our consciences to see if our desire to help the many, not the few, outweighed our sentimental attachment to our membership cards.

Saturday, 6 May 2017

Take no joy in the utter failure of Corbyn as a leader, as the vast majority of political commentators have always predicted. The only crumb of comfort that Labour can really take from yesterday was winning two metro mayor posts and coming within a whisker of a third.

But the local election results are truly disastrous in two ways.

One, as the New Statesman's George Eaton pointed out, because if the general election had the same voteshare of 27%, it would be the lowest for Labour since the end of the First World War.

Two, because of the following maths.

The poll lead of the Tories in the election is currently 11%. In the last pre-election poll (May 4th, YouGov), it was 19%. Why the huge difference?

Because in the locals, there is generally turnout of, say, 25-30%. In the general, it is usually, say, 55-70%. Of the order of double the turnout.

If there is asymmetry between the likelihood of one party's voters staying at home and another's, this accounts for inaccuracies in the ability of the local elections poll to truly reflect national voteshare (as measured by that last YouGov poll). After all, it's just half of the voters who will vote in June, so it's hardly representative. Not to mention, of course, the fact that not all parts of the country have local elections, again, not fully representative.

But the chilling thought for Labour is, the June poll is likely to be a much more accurate reflection of the national opinion polls (assuming that they are broadly accurate). That is, the Tories' poll lead is likely to be much closer to 19% than to 11%.

Labour has actually got off extremely lightly in these local elections, compared to what opinion polls said should have happened.

It seems unlikely that this luck will hold in the general election. A 19% poll lead there could perhaps even push it below the 1918 result of 21%.

Tuesday, 2 May 2017

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Labour landslide. I blogged this little piece for Labour Uncut on what it was like.

The day was sunny, and my little Triumph Herald – referred to somewhat unkindly by my Tory opponent, David Curry, as “that old jalopy” – trundled its way across the Yorkshire Dales, blaring out D-Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better” from a speaker strapped across its roof for the day by my friend Richard’s dad.

The campaign strategy in Skipton and Ripon, the Tory heartland constituency where I went to school, had been simple. Make any kind of noise at all to show them you’re alive, and people would come out for you who didn’t usually even realise there was a Labour candidate standing. Good people came out to help us. People who simply saw Labour as a force for good and would come out and leaflet with us in Ingleton, Settle or Skipton in the rain.

That sunny day, though, there was change in the air. Indeed, you felt that by merely repeating “Britain Deserves Better”, the campaign slogan, endlessly through the PA system, you were somehow personally willing the end of 18 years of Tory government, something that had become almost impossible to conceive.

The Tories had not only messed up the economy through its antics in the ERM, the forerunner to the Euro; they had given us the Poll Tax which taxed you regressively for having the temerity to vote; and the hated Section 28, which essentially institutionalised the idea that gay people were bad.

They had it coming. But the only reason for their longevity then, as now, had been the fundamental uselessness of Labour as an opposition over a long period. We needed only to get our act together, and they crumbled.

That evening, after three solid weeks of morning-till-night campaigning, I remember collapsing into an armchair, thinking that the exit polls were really looking pretty good. There was no Portillo moment for me: I woke up the next morning to attend my own count around lunchtime, the fact of not winning myself massively outweighed by the shining, stunning achievement of the first Labour government of my voting life.

We never going to win, of course, although 12,171 good-hearted Labour supporters helped us make a good dent. We didn’t care. Labour was in and, as Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

This was a very gentle, English kind of revolution, though. And for a brief moment a nation, which had spent a great deal of its recent past gazing nostalgically at its own navel, had become a little more tolerant, open and kind.

Sunday, 16 April 2017

Thinking about the ugly fate which might genuinely soon befall Europe, should Marine Le Pen win the French presidency - lately made more possible by the recent surge for Jean-Luc Melenchon, raising the spectre of a far-left/far-right runoff from next week's vote - I set to thinking about what makes the current renaissance of populism/nationalism so potent.Richard Dawkins invented the neologism "meme" to mean the cultural equivalent of a gene, an idea that embeds and propagates itself in a society, which could be either positive or pathological. Religion (if you are atheist, like Dawkins) is one. Nationalism, I would argue, is also one and usually pathological.Whither nationalism? Yes, a recent economic depression over much of the world has helped, as it did in the early 1930s. Easy answers from charlatans are always attractive. But ultimately, what is it all about? Why, about looking for the historic weakness in each country's psyche, which is gently stroked by the nationalist. Just as party-populist Jeremy Corbyn has tickled his party's sensitive tummy about being a "real" socialist (not a "pretend" socialist like those nasty new Labour figures who, you know, actually won elections and did stuff), each grouping or country has a weakness, preyed on by the unscrupulous.For the English, of course, the fantasy that they can recreate their glory days. No longer, of course, their imperialist past - only the neo-Nazis can lack self-awareness to that degree. No, now it is simply that it, a medium-sized world economy, can cut the same figure outside the EU as it formerly did inside. For the Scots, it is that a nation of nine million souls can do something similar, outside Britain while inside the EU (good luck with that). The Catalans, that they can really count for something in the world outside of Spain. And so on.But it is a general phenomenon: Americans, seeing that they no longer have a global economic hegemony thanks to China, are panic-stricken and fall back on the snake-oil answers of "making America great again" peddled by Trump. The French's weakness is that they have never really managed to integrate their North African neighbours or actually face up to the fact that their statist scleroticism is hopelessly out of date. The Germans that they feel they have been just going round being too nice to everyone during the postwar period. The central Europeans who have never quite got used to foreigners (and Jews in particular, in some countries such as Hungary). And the Russians, whose leader's harking back to the good old days of being a true superpower and identifying convenient bogeymen, for him to protect them against, has gone down a storm. In each case, the nationalist leader feeds the weakness, the particular self-indulgence of the nation. There is only one way out of this descending spiral: the nous, and the balls, to stand up and call this irrational self-indulgence out for what it is. We shall see, in each country separately, whether this can be done. The signs are currently not good.

Friday, 7 April 2017

“Can’t get the stink off/He’s been hanging round for days”, wrote Thom Yorke in 1993. “You do it to yourself, you do/And that’s what really hurts”. Lines that could have been written for Labour’s troubled, Stockholm-syndrome relationship with one man. A man who is still hanging round a party which somehow cannot seem to shake him off, either.

Last Tuesday, Ken Livingstone was, essentially, let off. A man who for years has ridden perilously close to anti-Semitism in his behaviour – we shouldn’t forget the “concentration camp guard” incident with a Jewish journalist in 2005 – finally crossed the line a year ago when he decided to argue that Hitler was a Zionist.

Saturday, 1 April 2017

It’s been over a decade since my last trip to the States. I used to go at least once a year or so but…young kids, you don’t do long-haul very often (and the experience of 26 hours to Australia with a one year-old in a cot vomiting, well, I was a bit more sensible after that).

I am surely not the first to observe that Texas is big. Texans, relative to us skinny Europeans at least, are big. Everything is big.

On the way from the airport I see a great number of houses, and my first thought is that they are multi-flat blocks. But thinking about it, they may well have been individual homes. That bigness again. The cars. Everything is far apart, spaced out in a sprawling landscape of greenery, dotted with malls. No-one walks.

And then there is Fox News. I watch it one morning at breakfast-time. The headline: “Illegal Immigrant Killed My Son”. Cue interview with tearful mother. The clear implication being that you couldn’t really expect much more of an immigrant but that she or he be a murderer. We have to stop these “illegals” – it has become a noun, rather than an adjective. It is dog-whistle politics, but one where the racism is not latent, but blatant.

It is theatre, it is perhaps highly effective in influencing some people but it is not broadcast news, not in any form that we would recognise. This is Trump’s 24-hour propaganda channel, where he is never criticised, not once.

One honestly wonders what the difference is between this and Putin’s sycophantic, puppet news stations, so beautifully exemplified by the truth-twisting, English-speaking Russia Today that you can catch on European satellite TV.

Today the news items on all channels cover former the desire of Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, to testify (against Trump, we presume, in the small matter of his team’s links to Putin’s regime) in return for immunity. These kind of shenanigans do not exactly represent politics-as-usual, especially not a mere 70 days into an administration which has notched up during that time not one political success.

This is not the America I know and love. But it is surely a temporary aberration, it must be. This fine country cannot long sustain the incompetence, corruption and downright treachery of its current administration.As I fly home, I am reminded – thanks to Pablo Larrain’s rather well-made film, which is showing on the plane – of Dallas’ accidental, tragic place in America’s story; the site of the most famous assassination in post-war history.

In the film, Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy asks exhaustively about Lincoln’s funeral, concerned to ensure her husband is presented and remembered as a great man.

One wonders who, exactly, will think of the vain, corrupt and ridiculous Trump at the end of his term as a “great man”.

Monday, 27 March 2017

For weeks now, the party’s left has been whispering about a “soft coup”. Ah, the old Soviet tactic, much beloved of today’s Vladimir Putin: confuse things by accusing your opponents of whatever you are up to yourself. Oh, and make them feel under attack, so they close ranks.

As revelations about Jon Lansman’s declared strategy for Momentum as an alternative power base to the party itself became public, it seems Monday night’s PLP meeting was converted into something of a showdown.

Corbyn jeered. Watson cheered. The PLP, depressed and muted for months since Corbyn’s re-election, suddenly found its voice.

And it was that same Tom Watson leading the charge – a loyalist clearly adept at unearthing the truth but in this case apparently with a couple of years’ time-lag.

Tuesday, 7 March 2017

It was a cold February morning, when the Shadow Chancellor finally gave in to his demons and went “full conspiracy theory”.

To be fair, he probably didn’t feel too well. Labour had just suffered a “historic” by-election defeat at the hands of the governing party, something unheard of in thirty-five years and with the biggest pro-incumbent vote increase in a half-century.

It all had to be, of course, the fault of the Blairites. Particularly the man himself for his recent intervention over Brexit, who will shortly celebrate a decade of, er, not being the leader of his party. Not to mention Lord Mandelson, the incarnation of all evil to a Corbynite.

Sunday, 19 February 2017

Since Jeremy Corybn’s rise to prominence, there has been a seemingly never-ending succession of skeletons pulled out of the closets of senior Corbynites, to the delight of Tory press officers everywhere.

But the connecting thread between all these embarrassments has been clear: no matter how senseless or unsavoury, they have all been essentially connected, in the minds of the perpetrators at least, to political positions.

For example, the connections with anti-Semites are always justified on the grounds that the people in question are merely anti-Israel (of course!) The IRA connection? Because they were romantic freedom-fighters, naturally, who happened to kill people. And the Stalin connection because, well, Communism wasn’t all bad, was it? However dire the story, there was always some kind of contorted political justification which allowed the people involved to continue to look at themselves in the mirror the following morning.

In contrast, this was clearly not the case with Ian Lavery. Lavery is Corbyn’s new Elections Coordinator and the man in charge of every set of elections, we presume, from now until Labour is inevitably decimated in 2020.

Thursday, 26 January 2017

Perhaps a counter-intuitive observation, but Trump's nearest bedfellow in the UK, apart from the obvious Farage, is Jeremy Corbyn. Like Trump, Corbyn is a populist "anti-politician", although his populism only extends to his own membership and a handful of left radicals in the population outside it. Despite being on the left rather than the right, Corbyn agrees with Trump policies on non-interventionism, economic isolationism, anti-"elitism" and has the same attitude to twisting the truth for the greater good of the cause, always blaming the media for bias when caught out. It is a perfect Molotov-Ribbentrop meeting of far left with far right.But we should also mark the desolate triumph of Trump. It is difficult to find any kind of precedent in America's history of a person so unsuited to office, from his antics as a documented sex pest, to his ignorance of history and geopolitics, his inability to avoid conflicts of personal and political interest and his simple habit of casual lying. Or his seeming lack of value - perhaps unique among presidents of the last century or so - for democracy itself.Trump has, reportedly, reinstated a bust of Churchill in his office, citing him as an "inspiration". It also seems clear that Churchill would have despised Trump, not only as a great man might reasonably despise a little one unexpectedly catapulted to high office; but because Trump seems intent on undermining the two great post-war pillars that Churchill's work helped create: NATO and the EU.Churchill was, of course, as well as a statesman, an accomplished historian. It is his sense of history which is so desperately lacking in the politicians of today. Those few who do will recognise the whiff of the 1930s - his wilderness years - in today's political climate; a period when populations were also desperate for a change.Trump is not Hitler; not yet, anyway. But the news today, that not only is his Secretary of State hopelessly compromised but the entire team of senior civil servants under him have refused to take part in this charade of a useful place for America in the world, augurs terribly for the free world over the next few years, in the face of a resurgent and aggressive Russia appeased by its leader.This is not a bunch of whining liberals complaining about George W Bush, a man who, for all his flaws, had a sense of decency and duty. This is people of all political stripes aghast at the victory of a man who appears to have no principles at all.These are, to be frank, dark times. We can only hope that, somewhere, there is a Churchill observing from the sidelines, who can at some point step forward and bring some sense back to the post-war order.

Saturday, 21 January 2017

Coming hot on the heels of that of Jamie Reed, the resignation of Tristram Hunt may not be a huge surprise to many. A decent and politically-sensible member of the House, if not the obvious next leader he was sometimes billed as. In the end, it is perhaps inevitably those who least see politics as their true vocation, who soonest see more attractive things on the horizon.

But there’s an important take-away here. It’s simply not normal to have three MPs resign their seats in a month. Unless they are pushed, seriously ill or are going for another political job*, it’s really, really unusual for them to “just resign”.

The fact that three by-elections have been caused in the last month through MPs “just resigning” – two Labour, one Tory – is not just unusual, it’s unprecedented in recent political history.

Friday, 6 January 2017

It seems like a statement of the blindingly obvious but, during the current calm of the Obama fin-de-siècle, and before the storm which the Trump inauguration is likely to kick off, it seems like America has almost forgotten itself. The impact of the outsider’s November victory has temporarily become 2016’s giant elephant in the room. But the impacts may well resonate for years.Those who think Trump is a Good Thing remain delighted, revelling in their apparent vindication, although perhaps slightly nervous at a victory they did not expect. On the other hand, the majority of voting Americans – who did not want Trump, and whose number included many registered Republicans – almost seem to have become numb to what is about to happen. They should not.

As New Republic’s senior editor Jeet Heer put it,

People in America are underestimating possibility things could get really weird and really scary really fast.

In many ways, this numbness, this complacency is something that Democrats have brought upon themselves. Not, to be clear, because they fielded the wrong candidate: it has now become a particularly dumb conventional wisdom on the left that the Dems should blame themselves, as if somehow the primary process could be manipulated by the DNC to get the candidate they wanted, and they chose Clinton.

No, they should take their share of the blame because before every Republican president has ever taken office, they have always said that the sky would fall in, and it never has. Objectively, Reagan and the two Bushes were not always great presidents, but they were not terrible presidents, either. All had some foreign policy successes, for example. So now, Chicken Licken has now become the boy who cried wolf, and no-one believes that some really rather bad stuff might now happen, for real.

In short: in a couple of weeks’ time, we are we are likely to start seeing some strange things. This whole Trump phenomenon isn’t going to go away and, what’s more, it is likely to have big global impacts.

Anyone who doesn’t believe this has only to check out Trump’s schoolboy statements on foreign policy to date, or even his cack-handed congratulatory calls with those world leaders in countries where he has business assets, without ever addressing his clear conflicts of interest.

But the major risk to the world is clear: if Obama encouraged an ever-more aggressive Russia through his inaction over Ukraine and Syria, Trump is likely to be substantially worse. His entourage has close links to the Russian regime – particularly Rex Tillerson, his choice for Secretary of State – and he clearly enjoyed the benefit of Russian hacking during the presidential campaign. A Trump who has already publicly downplayed America’s role in NATO is clearly going to be extremely reluctant to intervene in the event that, for example, Putin decides to “do a Crimea” in one of the Baltic states.

But whoa, there. This is a big deal. The principal of “all for one, one for all” is at the centre of NATO, the organisation which, despite its limitations, has kept the peace in Europe for seventy years. Once that principle is shown no longer to hold, the NATO structure really becomes meaningless and the whole complex ecosystem of post-war treaties breaks down. Putin is then free to retake any of the former Soviet states as he pleases.

And then there is China. Already the world’s largest economy after adjusting for purchasing power, Trump has already irritated its leadership over Taiwan and then again, this week, over his “erratic tweets” about North Korea. Bottom line: China is already talking down to Trump like he were a little boy with a box of nuclear matches.

Not to forget Trump’s neighbours closer to home. If he really decides to build the now-famous “wall” to keep out Mexicans, he will not only do untold damage to his local relations with the whole of the Americas but the US economy (and probably all his own businesses as well).

Finally, with NATO’s very existence in question, the US’s European allies can look forward to being more alone geopolitically than they have been since the 1930s. And in terms of being a global statesman who might in the end see his country’s interests in a secure and prosperous Europe, even his supporters would hardly put him on a par with FDR. And ironically for Trump’s new best friend, Nigel Farage, his new trade negotiator sees Brexit as a chance to screw Britain, not help it.

Should we as Labourites and internationalists be concerned? More than that. We should be ashamed. We have a leadership which, via a strange Molotov-Ribbentrop manoeuvre, actually supports the current Trump position on isolationism, on Russia, on NATO and on Brexit.

No, it is not time for people to stop worrying about Trump and think that things will settle down, that normal checks and balances will take effect; in fact, the signs are so far that Trump is determined to break free of those normal checks and balances, such as controls over conflicts of interest.

We should not, in short, assume that this is all so much over-reaction by whining liberals: history tells us that horrifically bad results can sometimes come out of democratic votes, results that can take years or even decades to reverse.

It is not necessary to be a political genius of any colour to see that the combination of Trump’s sheer ignorance and naked self-interest, in the context of geopolitics, make the coming years a very dangerous time for the world indeed. We in Labour should take care not to help him.

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About the blogger

Activist, free thinker, Labour Party management team through 2001 and 2005 general elections, responsible for Labour's early web presence and creator of its first-ever national electoral register. Dad to two lovely little girls. Now work as project/programme/interim manager for an evil multinational, with a sideline in political commentary.

Politically think of myself as a loyalist (rather than a parrot). Member of Progress and the Co-op. My posts are vetted only by my, er, own sense of discretion and propriety. I've worked in business for many years, so have no truck with anti-business prejudice. Like social/ethical business, co-operatives and sustainability. Fought one general election and longlisted by NEC panel to be Labour candidate in 2010.